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AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably

nature.com

161–170 of 217 posts

Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably

#161
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more basic problem is that their methodology would conclude Harry Potter is better than Ulysses, AC/DC is better than Carla Frey, etc etc. It is completely fine to enjoy "dumb" art - I like Marvel comics and a lot of the Disney-era Star Wars novels have been pretty fun. But using easiness and fun as a metric of quality is simply celebrating ignorance and laziness.

Why is Ulysses better than Harry Potter?

Why is Harry Pottery better than a more unknown book like the Sugar Barons? Both are exciting but one is based on real events/letters..

I think parent is basing it on high art principles which are: older better, uniqueness, what others agree is valuable and content/quality.

Why aren't we talking about the first english book published? The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye

Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably

#162
Important correction: "English poetry". It is massively different from the most Indo-European poetry which adds very strict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrical_foot rules. In Russian poetry, for example, even a single missed metrical foot violation is considered as a severe mistake and would be noticed by every reader. Also all good poets avoid use common rhymes (also verb rhymes) as cliché (which is considered as a mistake there), while AI tends to use common rhymes by design. There are exceptions (like Russian futurism poetry), but other than that AI fails massively.

Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably

#163
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more basic problem is that their methodology would conclude Harry Potter is better than Ulysses, AC/DC is better than Carla Frey, etc etc. It is completely fine to enjoy "dumb" art - I like Marvel comics and a lot of the Disney-era Star Wars novels have been pretty fun. But using easiness and fun as a metric of quality is simply celebrating ignorance and laziness.

Why is Ulysses better than Harry Potter?

Are you aware of studies of Ulysses and James Joyce in general? That's a good start for this discussion, assuming it's not just a kneejerk reaction.

Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably

#164
post #122
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people seem to prefer Avengers 17 over any cinematic masterpiece, the latest drake song would be better rated than a Tchaikovsky... We should let them play and worship chat gpt if that's what they want to waste their time on

I don't understand the logic of calling superhero movies lesser/unserious like this, it's very snobby. Movies and music are made to be entertaining, the avengers is more entertaining than your "arthouse cinematic masterpiece that nobody likes but it's just because they aren't smart enough to understand it". It's also lazy and ignorant to ignore the sheer manpower that goes into making a movie like that.

Movies, music, wiriting, all human arts, are made to make their audience feel something. "Entertaining" is only a small and honestly ill-defined subset of this, no more valid than any other approach.

Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably

#165
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the logic of calling superhero movies lesser/unserious like this, it's very snobby. Movies and music are made to be entertaining, the avengers is more entertaining than your "arthouse cinematic masterpiece that nobody likes but it's just because they aren't smart enough to understand it". It's also lazy and ignorant to ignore the sheer manpower that goes into making a movie like that.

> your "arthouse cinematic masterpiece that nobody likes You're reading way too much into my comment. Any block buster from the 80/90s absolutely shits on 90% of block busters released today. I'm not talking about obscure 1950s czechoslovak cinema here... > ignore the sheet manpower that goes into making a movie like that. A lot of work doesn't make something good, especially when cgi quality actually gets worse year…

> Any block buster from the 80/90s absolutely shits on 90% of block busters released today

You sure it's not survival bias, as in, you only are thinking and remembering the good ones over a two-decade period and comparing them against what movies came out this year. When in reality, there might be tons of blockbusters in those era that were just as bad as your average one today?

Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably

#166
post #122
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people seem to prefer Avengers 17 over any cinematic masterpiece, the latest drake song would be better rated than a Tchaikovsky... We should let them play and worship chat gpt if that's what they want to waste their time on

I don't understand the logic of calling superhero movies lesser/unserious like this, it's very snobby. Movies and music are made to be entertaining, the avengers is more entertaining than your "arthouse cinematic masterpiece that nobody likes but it's just because they aren't smart enough to understand it". It's also lazy and ignorant to ignore the sheer manpower that goes into making a movie like that.

I don’t fully agree with putting down “fun” movies like the Avengers, but at the same time “serious” art is not primarily for plain entertainment.

People might find “serious” art meaningful and it might spark feelings in them, but that’s not the same as getting an adrenaline rush from exploding cars in an action scene.

Of course there are also cases where the boundary between “fun” and “serious art” is not so clear, there are always exceptions to any attempt to define what makes something “serious art”. Art can also be subversive and run counter to traditional expectations of what art “should” be. But I don’t think the Avengers is an example of that.

Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably

#167
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The selection of human poets is cooked to give the result they wanted. I will grant the authors may have lied to themselves. But I don't think honest scientists would have ever constructed a study like this. It is comparing human avant garde jazz to AI dance music and concluding that "AI music" is more danceable than "human music", without including human dance music! It's just infuriating.

They expressly state the result is likely because the AI poetry was more simple and direct than the poetry selected, which is more accessible for the average person not interested in poetry. They compare and contrast this with other studies where this was not the case. Yes, it's comparing apples and oranges; that's the whole point. It doesn't make the experiment itself flawed.

Hum, but it should have compared against human poems that go for a similar style no? Otherwise, it doesn't tell us much, except that AI was not able to make more complex poems? And maybe that people who don't like poetry when asked prefer simpler poems?

Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably

#168
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say Davis's definition of "objectively better" here is "nobody who reads these poems carefully could possibly conclude that this AI crap is better than Walt Whitman, the only explanation is Walt Whitman is so difficult that the raters didn't read it carefully." The Nature paper is making a bold and anti-humanist claim right in the headline, laundering bullshit with bad data, without considering how poorly-def…

>This data really is awful because the subjects aren't interested in reading difficult poetry. If the results were the opposite, would the data still be awful?

The data would still be awful, and people would pay less attention to the study because it’s not a priori surprising that ChatGPT would write worse poetry than the most celebrated poets in history.

If I use bad data to conclude that “Java is faster than C++ in most cases” you can be sure it will receive a lot more attention than if I reached the opposite conclusion based on similarly bad data.

Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably

#169
post #39

Ernest Davis has an outstanding and definitive rebuttal of these claims: https://cs.nyu.edu/~davise/papers/GPT-Poetry.pdf The basic problem is that GPT generates easy poetry, and the authors were comparing to difficult human poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and rating using a bunch of people who don't particuarly like poetry. If you actually do like poetry, comparing PlathGPT to Sylvia Plath is so offensi…

Huh, that sounds a little like claiming that AI can draw pictures just as well as humans because they look realistic at a first glance. But not if you check whether the text, repetitive elements, and partially-occluded objects in the background look correct.

To me, it sounds more like claiming that AI writes better code than Linus Torvalds because a group of random non-programmers preferred reading simple AI-generated Python over Linux kernel C code.

Re: AI poetry is indistinguishable from human poetry and is rated more favorably

#170
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This data really is awful because the subjects aren't interested in reading difficult poetry. If the results were the opposite, would the data still be awful?

The data would still be awful, and people would pay less attention to the study because it’s not a priori surprising that ChatGPT would write worse poetry than the most celebrated poets in history. If I use bad data to conclude that “Java is faster than C++ in most cases” you can be sure it will receive a lot more attention than if I reached the opposite conclusion based on similarly bad data.

> The data would still be awful, and people would pay less attention to the study because it’s not a priori surprising that ChatGPT would write worse poetry than the most celebrated poets in history.

[emphasis mine] You've inadvertently made the poster's point for them. You have written Spivak's "I knew it" reaction, just phrased more glibly.

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